Over the past week the illegal Howard regime has stepped up its relentless war against Australia's indigenous people.
Last Wednesday night, on the instructions of the National Capital Authority, federal police removed ceremonial spears and extinguished the Aboriginal Tent Embassy's "healing fire of the spirit" on the lawns of the new Parliament House in Canberra. This fire had been lit to "cure the evil, to right the wrongs" and to "take all lost souls home". A couple of days ago the police, with a tin ear for genuine spirituality, doused it again.
The tent embassy activists state that the Commonwealth of Australia is an "illegal, racist, colonial occupying power", and they seek a ruling to this effect from the International Court of Justice. In 1992 they presented a Declaration of Aboriginal Sovereignty over Australia to Robert Tickner, the hapless former minister in the Keating Government, who was silly enough to accept it.
Last July, they took action against Prime Minister John Howard, his deputy Tim Fischer, One Nation's Pauline Hanson and independent Senator Brian Harradine in the Supreme Court of the ACT, apparently unfazed by the court's supposedly illegal status.
Howard and his colleagues were accused of "genocide, attempted genocide, complicity in genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide and incitement to commit genocide", because of the Native Title Amendment Act. God forbid that real violence is ever used against the tent embassy. Short of calling it "planetary annihilation", the protesters won't have any words to describe what has happened.
But the opposition of the Labor party and the Democrats to the native title amendments didn't save them from the activists' wrath. A couple of days after the original court action, the tent ambassadors indicted every member of parliament for complicity in genocide and "failure to prevent genocide".
One of the strengths of Australia's liberal democracy is that, provided individuals are not slandered, the law allows people considerable freedom to say whatever they please, no matter how demented their statements. But one of the nation's present weaknesses is the readiness of many prominent people to take such loopiness seriously.
After last Wednesday's action against the tent embassy, Labor's Senator Nick Bolkus told ABC radio that it had been "a cowardly act of racial violence by the Howard Government under the cover of darkness". The ABC, always a sucker for this kind of brainless comment, loved it.
Perhaps Senator Bolkus was trying to curry favour with the protestors in the hope that they would exempt him from the genocide indictment. But a real man of honour would present himself to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, where he could be judged for the terrible crimes of which he is accused. This would set a great precedent, and would probably be welcomed by most Australians, including many in the senator's own party.
Daryl Melham, the shadow minister for Aboriginal Affairs, also fell victim to the Labor left's reluctance to condemn any kind of indigenous radicalism. While refusing to endorse the illegal fires on the Parliamentary lawns, he attacked what he called the government's "over-the-top, sledgehammer approach" to the tent embassy. Maybe he should join Senator Bolkus in The Hague.
The initial Aboriginal Tent Embassy was set up outside the old Parliament House on Australia Day 1972, in an inspired protest against the McMahon government's refusal to grant Aborigines any form of land rights. The word "embassy" expressed the feeling of many Aborigines that they were "foreigners in their own country so long as they had no legal freehold title to any part of Australia".
The idea seems to have come from the Aboriginal writer, the late Kevin Gilbert. Other creative people like Burnum Burnum and Roberta Sykes were also involved, and their commitment and flair focused public attention on the many injustices that Aborigines continued to suffer in those days.
On Australia Day 1992, the tent embassy was re-established near its original location. But in the twenty years that had passed, Australia's attitudes towards Aborigines had been transformed. A number of states had comprehensive land rights legislation, and the High Court was only months away from handing down its Mabo decision.
But the bases of radical Aboriginal protest had also changed. Now the tent embassy activists want to be foreigners in Australia. Sensible leaders should do nothing that could give credence to their foolish statements and actions.
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